Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

Among the many baroque splendours the Western has produced, The Wild Bunch stands out as one of the most extreme.
--Phil Hardy, The Western (William Morrow, 1983)

Sam Peckinpah directed a number of lovely films -- especially Ride the High Country (1962), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Junior Bonner (1972) -- but is remembered mostly for his penchant for violence.  The Wild Bunch had an intense response when it came out in 1969 because, for me and many others, it was a metaphor for the War in Vietnam.   I had been dodging my draft board for most of that year and was able to stay out of the army until the lottery in 1969 (which reminded one of the famous lottery in Shirley Jackson's story of the same name), when my number was 350.  The draft board called me for a physical that year anyway and I had to journey to Brooklyn for it because war protesters had bombed the selective service office on Whitehall Street.  The violence in The Wild Bunch was the most explicit ever seen in a Western, with scenes at the beginning and end showing blood spurting in slow motion, capturing the horror of violent death.

Unlike some of Peckinpah's lesser-known films, however, The Wild Bunch does not completely transcend its time:

There are too many zooms, telephoto shots and slow motion scenes.  This is a problem for many films of this period, of course, and there are moments of great beauty shot by cinematographer Lucien Ballard, but overall there is too much technique overshadowing the story

There are no roles for women, with the dubious exception of Mexican whores.  No one on any side (the bandits, the railroad bounty hunters, the Mexican rebels and regulars) has much regard for women.

The Wild Bunch itself includes some terrific actors -- William Holden, Ben Johnson, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien -- who don't seem comfortable in the West, either as a group or individually, with the slight exception of Johnson.  Robert Ryan is effective, however, as the world-weary leader of the ragtag group --"egg-sucking chicken thieves" -- chasing the bunch.

Peckinpah made a Western for its time as time for the Western was running out, now that motorcars were appearing in A Westerns (they had always been in the more contemporary B Westerns) and the frontier had basically closed (The Wild Bunch takes place in 1912).  It effectively captures a pessimistic time, when it looked like Vietnam would never end.